Under a DACA amnesty, American taxpayers would be left with a $26 billion bill. About one in five DACA illegal aliens, after an amnesty, would end up on food stamps, while at least one in seven would go on Medicaid. Since DACA’s inception under Obama, more than 2,100 illegal aliens have been kicked off the program after it was revealed that they were either criminals or gang members. JOHN BINDER

Protesters on Friday blocked Education Secretry
Betsy DeVos from entering two schools in Washington, D.C., on Friday, the
latest sign of opposition to President Trump's most controversial Cabinet
nominee. DeVos first tried to enter a a school building when protesters
physically blocked the stairwell. DeVos and her staff turned away and were
followed by a chanting protester who ripped her for her political donations to
Republicans. The protester chanted Shame! at DeVos as she got into her vehicle.
Sec. DeVos physically blocked by protesters from entering DC school—turned away
and left. Unclear if she attempted another door. @ABC7News
pic.twitter.com/buNgmOJbya— Sam Sweeney (@SweeneyABC) February 10, 2017

"Over two decades, the family has spent millions of dollars funding pro-privatization organizations and buying legislators."It was under President Obama that the most sweeping attacks on public education occurred. Despite the unions’ claims to the contrary, Obama and Duncan doubled down on NCLB. More than 300,000 teachers and other school jobs were permanently eliminated during Obama’s eight years.

How the Democrats paved the way for Betsy DeVos

By Jerry White10 February 2017

The Senate’s confirmation Tuesday of Betsy DeVos has placed a sworn enemy of public education and a proponent of for-profit charter schools and religious schooling at the helm of the US Department of Education. Like Trump’s other

cabinet appointees, DeVos is committed to

dismantling the very department she heads

and to lifting any restrictions on private

businesses seeking to cash in on America’s

$1.3 trillion “education market.”

With the confirmation of the Michigan billionaire, the American oligarchy has installed one of its own. The beneficiary of the merger of two family fortunes in Michigan—the former Prince auto parts empire and the Amway Corporation pyramid scheme—DeVos and her husband have an estimated net worth of $5 billion. Over two decades, the family has spent millions of dollars funding pro-privatization organizations and buying legislators.

Michigan has the country’s highest percentage of charter schools run by for-profit management companies and among the weakest regulations on the publicly funded and privately run schools. Under the state’s school “reform” law, nearly half of Detroit’s public schools are currently targeted for closure and potential transformation into private charters.

Trump has pledged to promote anti-teacher “merit” pay and spend $20 billion on school “choice.” The voucher policy in the state of Indiana is being suggested as a national model. In 2013, then Indiana Governor and now Vice President Mike Pence expanded the program, initiated by his Republican predecessor as a “social justice” initiative for poor children, to provide vouchers for up to half of their tuition to more affluent middle-class families with children already in private schools. Almost all the private schools eligible for vouchers are religious.

Millions of school teachers, parents and students are rightfully alarmed and realize that the coming months and years will require the most serious fight to defend public education. The prerequisite for developing a strategy for such a battle is a political understanding of what produced Trump and DeVos.

As the World Socialist Web Site has explained, the coming to power of a government of billionaires, ex-generals and ultra-reactionaries marks a qualitative change. However, Trump is not a sudden departure from the otherwise healthy development of US political and social life. On the contrary, he is the outcome of the long decay of American capitalism and the rise to the pinnacle of economic and political power of a corporate and financial aristocracy, which has sought to defend its global domination through endless wars overseas and a war against the social rights of the working class.

Perhaps nowhere in the realm of domestic policy is the continuity of Trump with previous administrations, Democrat or Republican, seen than in the decades-long assault on public education.

Before the 1980s, the proponents of “free market” education policies were only to be found on the most right-wing fringes of the Republican Party. In the mid-1950s, Chicago economist Milton Friedman first put forward his proposal for school vouchers to spend public money on private and religious schools, thereby creating “competition” for the public-school system.

Efforts by Ronald Reagan to introduce vouchers in the early 1980s failed due to popular support for the democratic and egalitarian principles embodied in public education.

It took the Democrats, under President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s, to rebrand this right-wing attack on public education as “school choice” for poor families. The Democratic president sharply increased federal spending for so-called public charter schools, whose numbers increased between 1992 and 2000 from 1 to more than 1,700.

“We should reward the best schools, and we should shut down or redesign those that fail,” Clinton declared in 1996, the same year his wife, Hillary Clinton wrote in her memoir, “I favor promoting choice among public schools.” Also in 1996, Milton Friedman and his wife launched the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, an organization Betsy DeVos would subsequently fund and promote.

Coming in the aftermath of the 1990-91 dissolution of the USSR and the capitalist triumphalism that followed, the Clintons spearheaded the Democratic Party’s repudiation of the social reforms associated with the New Deal and Great Society periods. Their free-market education policies coincided with the destruction of welfare as a federal entitlement program, a law-and-order crackdown on the poor, and Wall Street deregulation, which led to an explosion of financial speculation, the bursting of the dot.com bubble in 2000 and the Crash of 2008.

In 2002, George W. Bush would sign into law the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), coauthored by Democratic liberal icon Edward Kennedy. Under the scheme, schools that failed to improve under test-based Annual Yearly Progress assessments could be closed, turned into charter schools or “reorganized” by state officials. Various punitive “accountability” schemes scapegoated teachers for educational problems caused by poverty and decades of budget cutting.

In 2000, the DeVos family spent $13 million

to push a referendum to amend Michigan’s

constitutional ban on vouchers. However, like

a similar measure in California that year,

Michigan voters defeated the plan by a more

than 2-to-1 margin.

The Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a political action committee run by hedge fund managers including Teach For America cofounder Whitney Tilson, was formed between 2005-07 to promote their interests in the charter and edubusiness sector. Democrats representing Anchorage Capital Partners ($8 billion under management), Greenlight Capital ($6.8 billion), and other for-profit companies signed up to promote the legislative assault on public education. Congressman Barack Obama was a speaker at the inaugural meeting, and Arne Duncan was later recommended by DFER for Education Secretary.

It was under President Obama that the

most sweeping attacks on public

education occurred. Despite the

unions’ claims to the contrary, Obama

and Duncan doubled down on NCLB.

More than 300,000 teachers and other

school jobs were permanently

eliminated during Obama’s eight years.

Under the Race To The Top (RTTT) program, cash-starved school districts were encouraged to compete for “performance-based” grants based on their level of “innovation.” The markers of such innovation were merit pay, the adoption of Common Core (highly lucrative for testing companies and other edubusinesses) and the promotion of charter schools.

Obama hailed the 2010 firing of teachers and other school employees at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island after they rejected a “turnaround” plan authored by Duncan that would have torn up their contracts and forced them to work longer hours without additional pay.

During the eight years of the Obama’s assault on public education, the teachers’ unions—the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA)—all but ended teacher strikes, which had long been a regular feature of American life. When a strike was called, as in Chicago in 2012, the unions quickly shut it down to prevent a confrontation with the Obama administration, leading to mass school closings in Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities.

Far from opposing corporate-driven school reform, the unions insisted that it could be implemented more efficiently if state and local authorities used the services of the AFT and the NEA to suppress resistance. In Detroit, the AFT, working with local Democrats, shut down a series of sickouts, launched in defiance of the union, and facilitated the restructuring of the public school district under a Republican plan largely shaped by DeVos.

During DeVos’s confirmation hearings, Democrats staged a publicity stunt on the floor of the Senate before Vice President Pence cast his tie-breaking vote for DeVos. Afterwards, AFT President Randi Weingarten hailed the “movement for children” that would supposedly “serve as a check and balance” on the new education secretary. Weingarten held open the AFT’s “invitation” to DeVos to “work with educators,” but lamented that “it was more likely we’ll now hear the same trashing of public schools that the disrupters, the privatizers and the austerity hawks have used for the last two decades.”

There is no doubt that major battles are on the horizon. As this brief summation makes clear, however, the privatizers and austerity hawks have long included the Democratic Party, with which the unions are aligned. The struggle to defend and vastly improve public education therefore requires the building of a mass political and socialist movement independent of both big-business parties. Such a movement must be based on the working class, whose social interests are inseparably bound up with the fight to end social equality and the economic and political dictatorship of the oligarchy.

the European Union as well."Confirmation vote as farce: Senate approves billionaire enemy of public schools as secretary of education

By Niles Niemuth

8 February 2017

Billionaire Betsy DeVos was confirmed as secretary of education by vote of 51 to 50 in the Senate Tuesday with VicePresident Mike Pence casting the tie-breaking vote, marking the first time in US history that such a vote was necessary to confirm a cabinet secretary.

Tuesday’s vote was the culmination of four daysof stage-managed and increasingly farcical play-acting, in which Senate Democrats pretended to be putting up a ferocious battle against DeVos, while Senate Republicans pretended to be manning the barricades on her behalf.

In reality, the outcome was determined well in advance. The two Republicans who “broke” with their party to oppose DeVos undoubtedly cleared their actions in advance with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who can afford exactly two defections given the 52-48 Republicanmajority, and gave them permission.

The Democrats seized on the prospective 50-50 tie to conduct a 24-hour, round-the-clock “debate” highlighted by liberalSenator Elizabeth Warren’s plea for “just one more Republican” to defeat the nomination. Throughout this exercise in empty demagogy, in which the Democratsclaimed to be the defenders of public education and oppose its destruction, every Democrat who spoke was aware that DeVos would be confirmed by virtue of Vice President Pence’s tie-breaking vote.

Moreover, the previous Democratic administration, with Barack Obama in the White House and his Chicago crony Arne Duncan as head of the Department of Education, was an unmitigated disaster for public education. More than 300,000 teachers and other schoolworkers lost their jobs under the Obama administration, which through programs like Race to the Top encouraged the growth of charter schools and other efforts to privatize and weaken public school systems.

For all the Democratic chest-thumping about opposing Donald Trump, DeVos is the first of Trump’s cabinet nominees to be confirmed without any Democratic support. Some Democrats have voted for every one of previous six cabinet nominees to be confirmed, and in many cases thevotes have been overwhelming. Fourteen of the 48 Democrats had voted for the first five Trump nominees, only defecting in the confirmation of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and now DeVos.

Trump’s pick to head the Department of Defense, recently retired General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, was overwhelming approved lastmonth by a vote 98 to 1, receiving the support of nearly every Democrat in the Senate, including so-called “progressives” Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

An ideological opponent of public education, DeVos has donated millions of dollars to politicians and lobbying groups that support the funneling of tax dollars to private and religious schools through voucher programs and removing oversight of education spending through the establishmentof charter schools.

DeVos is associated with some of the furthest right-wing conservative figures and groups in the US.

Her father-in-law Richard DeVos, founder of the Amway pyramid scheme, played leadership roles in a variety of right-wing groups including Focus on the Family, the American Enterprise Institute and the FreedomWorks Foundation. Her brother Erik Prince is the founder of the notorious military contractor and mercenary firm once known as Blackwater.

In 2000, DeVos and her husband, Richard DeVos,former CEO and heir of the Amway corporation fortune, spent $5.6 million on a ballot initiative that would have amended the Michigan state constitution to create a voucher program. The initiative was overwhelmingly rejected by voters.

DeVos has also spent her money founding a variety of organizations that buy politicians’ support for the privatization of public education including All Children Matter, the Alliance for School Choice and the American Federation for Children. From 1995 to 2005, DeVos funded and sat on the Board of Directors of the Action Institute, a right-wing outfit that has advocated for the elimination of compulsory education and child labor laws.

After decades of pushing for the complete destruction of public education, DeVos will now direct the agency responsible for providing federal funding to public schools, collecting pertinent data, and enforcing privacy and civil rights laws regarding education.

With no experience in public education, DeVos earned her nomination from President Donald Trump to head of the Department of Education as a result of her ideological hostility to public education; she joins a host of Trump appointees who have expressed opposition to the missionsof their respective departments.

Additionally, DeVos was able to attain her position through the massive amounts of money she and her family have funneled into the coffers of the Republican Party and the campaigns of a host of Republicans candidates. She admitted during Senate committee hearings that she and her family had donated $200 million to Republican candidates over the last few decades.

In the last election cycle, DeVos and her family donated $2.25 million to the Senate Leadership Fund and $900,000 to theNational Republican Senatorial Committee. She personally donated a total of $1 million to 21 of the Republican senators who voted for her confirmation.

As a supplement to the backwardness representedby DeVos, it was announced at the end of last month that Trump had appointed religious obscurantist Jerry Falwell, Jr., son of the televangelist huckster and founder of Moral Majority, to lead a special panel tasked with eliminatingand curbing federal regulations on education.

Falwell is the president of Liberty University, a private Christian university based in Lynchburg, Virginia, which teaches creationism and maintains a code of conduct that forbids pre-marital sex and homosexual relationships among its student population. Students can be fined for attending a dance, visiting alone with a member of the opposite sex offcampus, or engaging in “inappropriate personal contact.”

The Christian fundamentalist was Trump’s first pick to lead the Department of Education but he turned down the position. He will now essentially join the Trump administration without facing a Senate confirmation vote.

Speaking to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Falwell made clear that he would use his task force to play a leading role in shaping federal education policy. “The task force willbe a big help to [DeVos]. It will do some of the work for her,” he said.

The new reports show that in addition to “traditional” coping strategies of skipping meals and eating cheap food, these teens and pre-teens are increasingly forced into shoplifting, stealing, selling drugs, joining a gang, or selling their bodies for money in a struggle to eat properly.